ProQuest® has appointed Michael Hirsch, Vice President, Product Management for its Serials Solutions® business located in Seattle, WA. In this high-impact role, Hirsch will drive product development and go-to-market strategies for Serials Solutions products, including the Summon®discovery service, the portfolio of library management products and services, and Intota®, a new SaaS library services platform.

The Serials Solutions product management team, under Hirsch’s leadership, will develop products, implement enhancements to current products and create synergy with other ProQuest technology solutions and content services; all with a primary goal of exceeding customer needs and expectations.

“Michael brings to ProQuest an impressive record of successfully developing products that respond to customer requirements, creating a strategy for growth and inspiring cross-functional teams,” said Matthew Brine, general manager, Serials Solutions. “With his collaborative management style and leveraging the expertise in his team, he will lead the development of new approaches to creating more value for our customers and amplifying the voice of our customer.”

Hirsch has decades of experience in product management, as well as a broad background in technology, creating a solid foundation for strategic planning and execution, product lifecycle management and market analysis. Most recently Hirsch was director of product management for the handsets and tablets business of T-Mobile, where he led multi-disciplinary teams, launched numerous wireless devices, established and grew T-Mobile’s tablet business. Hirsch held multiple progressive management positions at Sony Corporation and Universal Electronics, until his role as director of product management at Qualcomm from 2007-2011.

Hirsch earned his MBA with honors from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and holds Master and Bachelor of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering from UCLA.

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) announces it is now a member of Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique and persistent researcher identifiers. ORCID works with the community to embed these identifiers in research workflows and systems to connect researchers with their scholarly activities and contributions.

EBSCO Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Subscription Services, Robert Schoenvogel says ORCID will have far-reaching effects. “The work being done by ORCID will bring a broad array of people and organizations together and benefits nearly everyone involved in scholarly research. By integrating these unique and persistent identifiers for researchers into EBSCO products – especially the soon to be released Article Publication Charge (APC) management product, we are looking to help improve the experience for authors and publishers and enhance the scientific discovery process.”

ORCID is the latest group that EBSCO has joined that supports the open exchange of information. EBSCO is also a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), which represents the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers.

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), part of Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading provider of information and business intelligence for students, professionals and pharmacy, today introduced a completely revamped, interactive edition of Designing Clinical Research,the leading manual for clinical researchers for the past 25 years.  Every chapter has been extensively updated to cover recent advances in the field, and the new Fourth Edition is the first to offer four-color graphics and a fully interactive digital experience that gives readers a practical and user-friendly approach to designing a clinical study.

Designing Clinical Research, Fourth Edition, is available for the first time as a fully interactive digital experience powered by Inking™.  Viewable through a browser or as a download to a tablet or smartphone, the digital package includes the complete text with customized navigation and a rapid, index-based search capability.  In addition, new features that distill key information and enhance understanding have been added, including the text’s first four-color graphics, as well as new figures and tables.  Updated chapters cover recent advances and new developments in the field, such as non-inferiority trials for comparative effectiveness research, incidence-density case-control studies, confounding and effect modification, ethical aspects of whole genome sequencing, automated data management approaches and new NIH grant-writing requirements.

The new digital experience provides a host of new features that can help streamline the process of designing a study.  Users can link to relevant content directly from the text, to a newly created glossary, and to citations on PubMed and other related Internet articles.  Users also can share notes with colleagues and highlight text for easier reference, insert electronic bookmarks and cut-and-paste figures or text directly into presentations.

“In addition to the large amount of new material, our Fourth Edition continues as a practical guide for doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other health professionals involved clinical, translational and public health research,” said lead author Stephen Hulley, MD, MPH.  “It presents advanced epidemiologic concepts in a reader-friendly way, and suggests common sense approaches to the challenging judgments involved in designing, funding and implementing a clinical trial or observational study.”

Included in the manual are exercises for planning a study and new cases to illustrate the resolution of ethical dilemmas in clinical research.  A purchase includes access to a dedicated Designing Clinical Research website with teaching materials and interactive sample-size calculators.

Designing Clinical Research, Fourth Edition, is available in a package that includes a four-color print edition plus a fully interactive eBook powered by Inkling – all for a single price.  For the first time with this edition, readers can access the text plus all of the interactive multimedia content using iPad® tablets and iPhones.  The eBook also is available through Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook, and can be accessed online through a PC or Mac.

Designed for physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and health scientists in training, Designing Clinical Research, Fourth Edition, is available now for $82.79.  For more information or to purchase, please visit www.lww.com/hulley.

In partnership with American University of Sharjah (AUS), ProQuest is holding the Middle East Academic Libraries Symposium.  Over the next two days they will be bringing together senior leaders from the academic library market with key representatives from leading Middle East Universities to discuss knowledge and information strategies and resources for academics and also their institutions.

Speakers from around the world will discuss a variety of key topics linked to emerging research trends and library management. Opening the conference will be Robin Bew, Managing Director of the Economist Intelligence Unit.  Bew will discuss with delegates what role education and research plays in the economic development process within these countries and what opportunities the knowledge and digital economy provides.

Michael Gersch, Senior Vice President, Global Sales, Marketing and Customer Experience at ProQuest said that “As a proud partner to academic libraries across the Middle East, ProQuest is delighted to be co-hosting with the American University of Sharjah the ‘Middle East Academic Libraries Symposium’.  This event has been created to bring together key inspirational speakers from across the globe to discuss with delegates from the Middle East trends and topics which will lead to the exploration of options to assist in building robust strategies for their institutions”.

Acting Chancellor of AUS, Dr. Thomas Hochstettler said on holding the symposium, “It gives us great pleasure to co-host the Middle East Academic Libraries Symposium. As an institution of higher education, research is at the top of our list of priorities. We are very proud that our state-of-the-art library is among the finest in the region and reflects our commitment to quality research and development.”

Other key topics for the event will cover ‘Issues and Challenges Surrounding Library Management’ delivered by John McDonald from Claremont University Consortia and Jane Burke from ProQuest, ‘ebook strategy for building collections and framework models’ by Lorraine Estelle, JISC and Kari Paulson, ProQuest and finally ‘Digital Collection Management and Digital Preservation’ by Jeff Garrett, Northwestern University and Stephen Brooks from ProQuest.

Delegates are attending the symposium from across the Middle East including Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Algeria and Kuwait with numerous attendees also from within the United Arab Emirates.

Faculty of 1000’s F1000Prime (http://f1000.com/prime)  has launched a new personalized homepage and article alerting tool that learns from an individual’s research interests – and introduced a free one-month trial personal subscription for new and returning users.

In response to feedback from many life scientists and clinicians, efficient personalization and customization of the website is now central to the experience of using F1000Prime. Individuals just need to enter as few as three key words, of their choosing, to describe their research interests. Personalized recommendations of content based on how an individual uses a website have previously only been commonly seen on major retail websites and search engines.

The new homepage and article feed – effectively a personal table of contents – makes F1000Prime even more relevant and central to the day-to-day work of busy scientists and clinicians. To enable many people to try out these powerful new features, anyone who registers on the F1000Prime website, or signs-in if they have previously registered, can receive full, free personal access to F1000Prime for one month.

A personal homepage is created in three short steps, resulting in a feed of important and relevant articles – selected and commented on by F1000Prime’s Faculty of more than 5000 peer-nominated experts – as well as relevant articles from the largest life-science literature database, PubMed.

Faculty of 1000’s Chairman Vitek Tracz, said: “Our task is to provide the busy researcher with effective help to get highly relevant research articles fast. With this new technology underpinning F1000Prime we believe we’ve created the most effective, personalized, expertly-curated literature service for life scientists and clinicians.”

The technology behind these new features includes a unique algorithm that learns from selections an individual makes in setting up their homepage, and, over time and with use of the website, provides increasingly relevant articles.

Speaking of F1000Prime’s personalized alerting service, Prof Gerald F Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute said, “I enjoy and rely upon the many terrific features of Faculty of 1000, but lately I have begun to worry that my F1000Prime alerts know me better than I know myself.

The new F1000Prime homepage also suggests leading scientists and clinicians from the F1000Prime Faculty – including nine Nobel Prize winners – an individual should ‘follow’. Following Faculty Members creates an alert each time an expert recommends or comments on an article in F1000Prime.

Anyone accessing F1000Prime through a library subscription can continue to browse F1000Prime’s directory of top articles and expert commentaries without registering on the website, although registration is highly recommended to benefit from these new features.

To find out more about Faculty of 1000 and its new features, please contact Iain Hrynaszkiewicz on +44 (0)20 7079 4888 or email press@f1000.com. For more information, visit http://f1000.com/prime

The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading provider of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced the addition of Clinical Trials Intelligence to the Thomson Reuters CortellisTM suite, the industry’s most comprehensive information solution for drug discovery and development.

The Thomson Reuters Life Sciences team has invested significantly in Cortellis, creating a unique platform for drug researchers and developers to assess and integrate content from multiple sources, so they can confidently make time-sensitive, drug-related decisions. Clinical trial information is now part of the Cortellis content collection.

“Clinical research has changed dramatically during the last decade,” said John Brett-Harris, managing director of Thomson Reuters Life Sciences. “Clinical trials are now driven not only by traditional clinical characteristics of disease, but by molecular profiling, signaling pathways, and gene sequencing, to name a few of the major advances.Cortellis Clinical Trials Intelligence supports this transformation and allows customers to connect clinical trials to our other content programmatically – the way they want. Thomson Reuters is the only company to provide such a solution in the marketplace.”

Cortellis Clinical Trials Intelligence enables users to access and search information on more than 140,000 U.S. and global trials for biologics, diagnostics, biomarkers, medical devices and drugs targeting rare diseases. The solution also includes access to 200,000 press releases, 220,000 fully abstracted literature articles, 2.25 million articles related to clinical development supporting unparalleled outcome searching, 21,000 meeting abstracts, 8,000 conference reports, and transcripts of biomedical and medicinal chemistry industry analyst and investor meetings. It offers full integration with Thomson Reuters industry-leading drug pipeline and patent content and is available via the web portal or an application programming interface (API).

“Rather than providing another stand-alone clinical trials information tool, Thomson Reuters has provided deeper scientific and competitive insight by connecting that data with our content such as drug pipeline, patents, and biomarkers. Further, we provide analytics to help our users make sense of an increasingly complex landscape,” said Brett-Harris. “We are enabling clinical development professionals to gain a better understanding of the clinical environment, including what is working and potential pitfalls, so they can ultimately construct better trials.”

Cortellis Clinical Trials Intelligence provides dynamic visualizations that support fact-based decision making and enhance competitive positioning. It includes a trial timeline viewer that provides an up-to-date view of trial start dates, insights on trial duration trends and expected, actual or projected end dates for a given indication, company or drug. Cortellis Clinical Trials Intelligence also supports precision medicine strategies through the discovery of competitor activity for specific patient segments, biomarker utilization and novel insights into disease processes.

The new solution is designed to accelerate clinical trial development, improve outcomes, decrease time to market and maximize portfolio strategies for professionals in all areas of biopharm companies including clinical development and operations, R&D, marketing, business development plus vendors supporting clinical trial planning and execution. For more details about the development of clinical trials, visit this webpage.

“Cortellis Clinical Trials Intelligence is the most powerful resource of its kind. It enables industry professionals to make informed decisions that direct their clinical strategies and greatly reduce the time spent compiling and analyzing clinical information. This is a game changing solution for drug development,” said Wendy Hamilton, senior vice president, Thomson Reuters Life Sciences.

Learn more about Cortellis Clinical Trials Intelligence.